Tuesday, February 26, 2008

No less august journals than The Hive and the Wall Street Journal this morning carry accounts of the long overdue ascent of common sense alongside a countervailing decline in the credibility of the global warmenising religious cult led by the Prophet and his gospel according to Gore.

The journal laments the lack of media coverage of the hundreds of eminent scientists who defy the crowds of warmenists by holding a conference in New York to refute, rebut and generally debunk the nonsense propounded by Gore and the world's dedicated socialists. You can almost hear the protesters outside screaming 'Crucify them! Crucify them!'

Our very own Hive documents some remarkable and rare common sense emanating from Europe where carbon trading has been rejected on the grounds of damage to people's standard of living.

Adolf has seen no evidence to justify the foundational tenet of the warmenist faith, namely that rising CO2 levels lead to global warming. In point of fact, all the hard reliable data appears to confirm that there is no such link and that climate change is influenced in the main by solar activity. There is little doubt that human activity contributes to rising CO2 levels but that's about as far as common sense gets. Then the religious zealots take over and demand that we give up our three square meals a day and turn our country into a wilderness where we eat locusts while dressing in sack cloth.

Meanwhile, the NZ Labour Party and its intellectually handicapped sibling The Green Party have been diagnosed terminally ill, suffering from acute polloidal opinionitis and have determined their last living act will be to crush what economic life in our little country they have not already destroyed by inflicting on it a carbon trading regime guaranteed to plunge us back into the dark ages.

For this we can blame the once was witty economyst Michael Cullen for whom simple mathematics is a mystery - as evinced by the magical conversion of his Kyoto bonus into a Kyoto bill. He subscribes to the economyth that if we cut our throats first and then hand the knife to India and China they will do the same unto themselves.

The first thing John Key's government must do is put a hold on any commitment to Kyoto or any other carbon trading scheme while a proper independent inquiry into the evidence for and against climate change theory is held and a a careful cost benefit analysis of carbon trading is prepared and publicised.

10 comments:

david
said...

You're going to plan about extremism from environmentalists in the same post that claims emissions trading will send us into a new dark age? And link to an article about Lomborg who, despite being hopelessly panglossian about technology, admits that humans have generated climate change. You guys really make me laugh. This is the best though:

Adolf has seen no evidence to justify the foundational tenet of the warmenist faith, namely that rising CO2 levels lead to global warming

Well, you're going to have to invent some new physics for that not to be true. If, as no one doubts, CO2 is the second most important gas behind the greenhouse effect then adding more CO2 is going to trap more of the sun's energy and global temperature will rise.

I actually think there is a great deal of hysteria about how we should deal with global warming, but unreformed denialism like this means any contrary voices can be written off.

david you'll have to do better than that. You have no data to back up your weird theory, just a whole lot of dubious computer models. I see you join the socialists in your patronising and false claim "...everyone knows...."

Doesn't it bother you just a smidgen that any so-called correlation between CO2levels and global warming or cooling have been debunked? Don't you admit that solar activity is by far, the greatest influencer of climate change? So off you go and raise some new taxes to change the habits of the sun.

Until you can provide some reliable evidence for your preposterous theories, don't waste my blogspace with yur patronising drivel

I'm not talking about models, which ,by the way, are very well supported by retrodiction, I'm talking about some very basic physical chemistry. CO2 and other greenhouse gases have molecular structures that allow them to absorb infra-red radiation. Absorbing energy makes for more molecules banging into each other and that means more temperature. That's just true and we've known it Svante Arrhenius calculated how CO2 might change climate in 1896. If you think increasing CO2 will not effect global temperature then you'll need something working in the other direction...

The sun has been the most important factor in past climate change, solar output is not correlated with 20th century climate change.

These theories are neither preposterous nor mine. Though I respect that this is your space I'm not going to let you off with saying patently absurd things without correction.

david, you're digging yourself a hole. First you discuss some THEORIES on how CO2 MIGHT effect climate change. The you condede that solar activity has been the prime mover in PAST climate change but somehow is not involved in changes of the last hundred years or so. Yet I have read recently reliable commentary linking current changes with solar activity. The real killer however, is that even if the Western world closed down ALL it's industry, the resultant CO2 reduction is calculated to have little discernable effect on climate change.

I actually see now that this is kind of pointless. But I would like you to look up what theory means to a scientist (not what you think).

What I've told you about CO2 is a fact. In this absence of any other forces adding CO2 to the atmosphere has to increase temperature.

I'd like to see the evidence that increased solar output has anything to do with recent warming. I hardly think it's a surprising observation that more than one thing can change the earth's climate, it is quite a complex system...

You're almost right about the differences between 'business and usual' 'shutting down tomorrow' being minimal. There is a major lag in the response of atmospheric CO2 concentration to any action we take so we are locked in to warming for the next 50 to 100 years. But what we do in the next decade can circumvent much longer and worse warming for later generations - something that seems worth doing to me.

"I hardly think it's a surprising observation that more than one thing can change the earth's climate, it is quite a complex system..."

is in reply to your incredulity towards the idea that the sun might be responsible for one lot of climate change and not another. Not an admission that there is any evidence the sun has had anything to with the latest round.

We heat our flat with fire, firewood is not a perfect fuel but if it comes from a plantation that is replanted the wood itself is near carbon neutral (obviously oil is burnt to move it around and cut it down).

We don't have solar water heating or a front loading washing machine, the landlord is unlikely to shell out for them. (These sort of measures, high up front cost with long term benefits, are not likely to be a viable prospect to the man on the street while the cost of power doesn't include the damage being done to the environment by its generation - another could reason to cap and trade).

I live very centrally, just walk to the office. When I lived a little further away I biked, yet further car pooled.

I've seen clips from that documentary. If a scientist presented a graph he claimed to be from one place and was from another then proceeded to modify to suit his needs that would be the end of his career.

I am a PhD Student. In the past I have worked in the private sector, in academia and for a Crown Research Institute (which could conceivably be construed as the public service but I was just a lab rat).

But more importantly I think you've got me wrong. I'm not part of the 'end is nigh', there is too much hysteria from both sides of this debate but being a retard as saying there is no problem just means voices that stand against the cry that the world will be underwater by 2050 can be ridden of as nutcases

Sorry, but I have to laugh. I find the fact that environmentalists burn stuff is very funny. CO2 doesn't harm the environment: soot and particulates do. I have to use a clothes drier because of folk around me burning wood in winter. And you, too, seem to be in a built up area.Have warmist scientists considered that we could make our lives easier by sealing volcanoes over? That way, the CO2 not released by them could be substituted by us burning fossil fuels until we find cleaner energy. I'm not sure what we can do though about the CO2 released by oceans, though, when they undergo their cyclical warm up.

“We don't have solar water heating or a front loading washing machine, the landlord is unlikely to shell out for them. (These sort of measures, high up front cost with long term benefits, are not likely to be a viable prospect to the man on the street while the cost of power doesn't include the damage being done to the environment by its generation - another could reason to cap and trade).”But the change starts at home: perhaps you can convince him to buy a front loader and solar water heater by offering to pay an increased rent. After all, your water and power bills will go down. And when you move on and the landlord has to find new tenants, (s)he will have a marketing edge over other landlords.And with cap and trade, the cost of carbon is pushed down onto consumers, being the man in the street. All of the “solutions” to this warmist concern result in hardship to the working man in the street.

“I've seen clips from that documentary. If a scientist presented a graph he claimed to be from one place and was from another then proceeded to modify to suit his needs that would be the end of his career.” I’m not sure what you’re referring to there, but you may want to watch the whole thing. The claim that the sun, via sunspots, influences the earth’s temperature seems at first sight novel, I know. But then look at the effect that the moon has on sea levels, that seems quite a strange idea, too!

“I'm not part of the 'end is nigh', there is too much hysteria from both sides of this debate but being a retard as saying there is no problem just means voices that stand against the cry that the world will be underwater by 2050 can be ridden of as nutcases”I say there’s no global warming problem caused by man-made CO2. I say that most cyclical earth temperature changes are caused by a mix of the earth’s distance from and tilt to, the sun, plus variations in sun energy output caused by sun spots. We live with tides, we live with seasons, I’m sure we can live with longer periods of cooler or warmer temperature.

Ps Just in case it's unclear in my last comment:- I agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas- I agree that man's output of CO2 has increased- I understand that Man’s CO2 output is insignificant compared with the output of volcanoes, rotting vegetation, etc.- I understand that changes in temperature caused by increased levels of CO2 reach a maximum. That is, once the co2 in the troposphere has trapped ALL infrared light in that spectrum that co2 captures, increasing the levels of co2 will make no difference to temperature, as all of the infrared (heat) is absorbed. There is a little bit out there on this, but I can’t find links right away.- Satellites (although only around for 30 years) show little/no evidence of troposphere warming. If greenhouse effect was kicking in, this is where you’d see it first.- Earth temperature stations are considered by many to be unreliable, as where they are situated has an effect on measured results. There is a phenomenon called urban heat island: temperatures are higher in a city than in rural areas, do to industrial/transport/domestic activity. IPCC acknowledges this, but seem to have unverifiable methods for correcting for this which causes amusement (and concern) to climate scientists.- Graphs detailing co2 levels appear to track graphs showing temperature. Gore says that’s causal. Climatologists say unlikely, as when the temperature turns, co2 levels respond and turn anywhere up to 300 years later.- Graphs detailing sunspot activity also appear to track graphs showing temperature. The understanding may not be fully developed (but it might be, I’m just devil advocating) but real climate scientists seem to be excited by this. So I am too.- I heat my home in winter with a heat pump. It’s not sexy, but it’s cheap, and I’m of Scottish ancestry. So if the co2 banishers win, and all our electricity is generated by damming valleys up (or by 5x more wind turbines than we need (to allow for windless patches in different parts of the country but heaven help us, not all over the country at the same time)), my carbon output will be well less than someone who cuts trees down and burns them.- I need to shut up, now.